Posts

The initial pitch It started as a normal work-day morning, when my friend Alessio comes out of the blue and asked me to play some CTF. "My colleague sent me this VM challenge..." Challenge name: VeryMuch RE Description: Implementing my own VM - Can you check if I did it right? Milestones 15 minutes: player recognizes the implemented virtual machine 30 minutes: (the player) starts writing a disassembler 1 hour: (the player) has the whole program disassembled 1 hour and a half: (the player) understands the logic 2 hours and a half: (the player comes up with a) solution Later in the evening, I picked the challenge up....

I know, I know… It’s been almost two years since the last time I wrote here. Well.. I had stuff to do! I am still studying for my masters degree, but I had some major step forwards in many other directions. One of those was picking up NixOs, a great operating system powered by the almighty Nix package manager. There are various reasons behind this choice and I will probably expose them once I installed it as my main system on most of my boxes....

Disclaimer: all the “knowledge” you can find in this post, is obtained by trial and error, documentation reading and years of struggling using GPG. Some information may be out of date or just incorrect. Disclaimer 2: as many others point out, GPG is not the easiest software to deal with. Moreover its codebase is dated and hard to extend. Further, in this day and age is pratically used only by the FOSS community and the “darknet” drug dealers....

Today I decided to refresh my Firefox profile, here is a little log. Why Firstly, I decided to refresh the profile since it was a while I didn’t take care of it. Secondly, my last setup depended on about:config, thus all my edits where “ethereal”. This time I configured everything using the sysadmin way: user.js. The goal of this renewal was to minimize big tech tracking while still preserving Firefox usability, which in my case, comes before any tinfoil paranoia....

Today I was looking for a simple and efficient way to add aliases to the Windows Run dialog box (the one you can open using Win+R). Turns out my preferred way to do so is editing the registry, adding a key under HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Paths ending with .exe. The Default value represents the exe you want to run, you can also add a subkey string value to the key with the name Path to specify the path where you want to run your alias....